John Irving - In One Person

“I want to thank most of you for making me feel younger than I am—beginning with you, dear Bill,” Larry had begun. (Okay—perhaps Larry was being a little barbed, to Russell.)

I knew it wouldn’t be a late night, not with all the old farts in that crowd, but I’d not expected such a warmhearted event. I wasn’t living with anyone at the time; I had a few fuck buddies in the city—they were men my age, for the most part—and I was very fond of a young novelist who was teaching in the writing program at Columbia. Rachel was just a few years younger than I was, in her early thirties. She’d published two novels and was working on a book of short stories; at her invitation, I’d visited one of her writing classes, because the students were reading one of my novels. We’d been sleeping with each other for a couple of months, but there’d been no talk of living together. Rachel had an apartment on the Upper West Side, and I was in a comfortable-enough apartment on Third Avenue and East Sixty-fourth. Keeping Central Park between us seemed an acceptable idea. Rachel had just escaped from a long, claustrophobic relationship with someone she described as a “serial-marriage zealot,” and I had my fuck buddies.

I’d brought Elaine to Larry’s birthday party. Larry and Elaine really liked each other; frankly, until my third novel, which Larry praised so generously, I’d had the feeling that Larry liked Elaine’s writing better than mine. This was okay with me; I felt the same way, though Elaine was a doggedly slow writer. She’d published only one novel and one small collection of stories, but she was always busy writing.

I mention how cold it was in New York that night, because I remember that was why Elaine decided she would come uptown and spend the night in my apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street; Elaine was living downtown, where she was renting the loft of a painter friend on Spring Street, and that fuck-head painter’s place was freezing. Also, how cold it was in Manhattan serves as a convenient foreshadow to how much colder it must have been in Vermont on that same February night.

I was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, when the phone rang; it hadn’t been a late party for Larry, as I’ve said, but it was late for me to be getting a phone call, even on a Saturday night.

“Answer it, will you?” I called to Elaine.

“What if it’s Rachel?” Elaine called to me.

“Rachel knows you—she knows we’re not doing it, Elaine!” I called from the bathroom.

“Well, it will be weird if it’s Rachel—believe me,” Elaine said, answering the phone. “Hello—this is Billy’s old friend, Elaine,” I heard her say. “We’re not having sex; it’s just a cold night to be alone downtown,” Elaine added.

I finished brushing my teeth; when I came out of the bathroom, Elaine wasn’t talking. Either the caller had hung up, or whoever it was was giving an earful to Elaine—maybe it was Rachel and I shouldn’t have let Elaine answer the phone, I was thinking.

Then I saw Elaine on my bed; she’d found a clean T-shirt of mine to wear for pajamas, and she was already under the covers with the phone pressed to her ear and tears streaking her face. “Yes, I’ll tell him, Mom,” Elaine was saying.

I couldn’t imagine under what circumstances Mrs. Hadley might have been prompted to call me; I thought it unlikely that Martha Hadley would have had my phone number. Perhaps because it was a milestone night for Larry, I was inclined to imagine other potential milestones.

Who had died? My mind raced through the likeliest suspects. Not Nana Victoria; she was already dead. She’d “slipped away” when she was still in her seventies, I’d heard Grandpa Harry say—as if he were envious. Maybe he was—Harry was eighty-four. Grandpa Harry was fond of spending his evenings in his River Street home—more often than not, in his late wife’s attire.

Harry had not yet “slipped away” into the dementia that would (one day soon) cause Richard Abbott and me to move the old lumberman into the assisted-living facility that Nils Borkman and Harry had built for the town. I know I’ve already told you this story—how the other residents of the Facility (as the elderly of First Sister ominously called the place) complained about Grandpa Harry “surprising” them in drag. I would think at the time: After a few episodes when Harry was in drag, how could anyone have been surprised ? But Richard Abbott and I immediately moved Grandpa Harry back to the privacy of his River Street home, where we hired a round-the-clock nurse to look after him. (All this—and more, of course—awaited me, in my not-too-distant future.)

Oh, no ! I thought—as Elaine hung up the phone. Don’t let it be Grandpa Harry!

I wrongly imagined that Elaine knew my thoughts. “It’s your mom, Billy. Your mom and Muriel were killed in a car crash—nothing’s happened to Miss Frost,” Elaine quickly said.

“Nothing’s happened to Miss Frost,” I repeated, but I was thinking: How could I not once have contacted her, in all these years? I hadn’t even tried! Why did I never seek her out? She would be sixty-one. I was suddenly astonished that I hadn’t seen Miss Frost, or heard one word about her, in seventeen years. I hadn’t even asked Herm Hoyt if he’d heard from her.

On this bitter-cold night in New York, in February of 1978, when I was almost thirty-six, I had already decided that my bisexuality meant I would be categorized as more unreliable than usual by straight women, while at the same time (and for the same reasons) I would never be entirely trusted by gay men.

What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn’t mean my writing . What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever “protected” anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile? How could I be almost forty and not love anyone as sincerely as I loved Elaine? How could I not have lived up to those expectations Miss Frost must have had for me? She’d protected me, but for what reason? Had she simply delayed my becoming promiscuous? That was never a word used positively, for if gay men were more openly promiscuous—even more deliberately so than straight guys—bisexuals were often accused of being more promiscuous than anybody !

If Miss Frost were to meet me now, who would she think I most resembled? (I don’t mean in my choice of partners; I mean in the sheer number, not to mention the shallowness, of my relationships.)

“Kittredge,” I answered myself, aloud. What tangents I would take—not to think about my mother! My mom was dead, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t let myself think about her.

“Oh, Billy, Billy—come here, come here. Don’t go down that road, Billy,” Elaine said, holding out her arms to me.

THE CAR, WHICH MY aunt Muriel had been driving, was hit head-on by a drunk driver who had strayed into Muriel’s lane on Vermont’s Route 30. My mother and Muriel were returning home from one of their Saturday shopping trips to Boston; on that Saturday night, they were probably talking up a storm—just yakking away, nattering about nothing or everything—when the carload of partying skiers came down the road from Stratton Mountain and turned east-southeast on Route 30. My mom and Muriel were headed west-northwest on Route 30; somewhere between Bondville and Rawsonville, the two cars collided. There was plenty of snow for the skiers, but Route 30 was bone-dry and crusted with road salt; it was twelve degrees below zero, too cold to snow.

The Vermont State Police reported that my mother and Muriel were killed instantly; Aunt Muriel had only recently turned sixty, and my mom would have been fifty-eight in April of that year. Richard Abbott was just forty-eight. “Kinda young to be a widower,” as Grandpa Harry would say. Uncle Bob was on the young side to be a widower, too. Bob was Miss Frost’s age—he was sixty-one.